An update on this blog (my research, art and cartoons about abuse) and the way forward

I was asked why I wasn't doing art and cartoons by a few survivors, so I thought I'd answer that question here, in case anyone else wanted to know.

Bear with me.

My original intention for this blog was to do art and illustrations about abuse. And to write short blog posts that would explain a little of what I was feeling, perhaps with a little research, some links, and so on.

But I found that people were coming to this blog for answers, such as the original blog post I wrote on scapegoating in alcoholic and narcissistic families on my art blog, of all things. That original post has 10,326 hits as of this writing (that is only the one post, not other social media hits, and not the whole blog).

I don't know where the hits are coming from, or from whom, but Google lets me know how many hits I get per post at least.

All of the art work I made for that post went viral (and I saw them come up on my own social media feeds many times) with the exception of the scapegoat with the butterflies that started the whole post off (at least as far as I know). However, on my art site, the scapegoat has edged out all of my other art works in terms of sales. So those sales either came from that original blog post, or it has made some rounds on social media without me knowing (i.e. seeing it come up on my own feeds, seeing where it has made the rounds, who put up the art works, and so on).

RESEARCH

There are many reasons why I turned much more heavily to research. One was that a therapist encouraged me to do so from the very beginning (and has been instrumental in suggestions for posts, and correcting me at times). And I also have a mind for research.

The other reason was that I was heavily involved in the "survivor community" and some of the stories I heard were so disturbing, I felt I had a role to play in making lives better for survivors.

So often survivors are caught in a cycle of "he loves me, he loves me not", which is really a cycle of "love bomb, devalue, discard-or-destroy", and they are confused and cannot seem to get off the wheel. There are many reasons they feel they cannot get off the wheel, and that deserves a post of its own. In a very short-hand version it has to do with lack of resources including not knowing where to turn for help, attachment (trauma bonding, co-dependency and love), a profound lack of proper education in the society as to what constitutes abuse to fully understanding the health repurcussions and societal ramifications of abuse, cultural (victim blaming, a profound ignorance of abuse topics and pressuring victims to "make up" or "forgive" when it actually puts them in more danger) and how trauma manifests when there are lulls in abuse (freeze responses, how the mind tricks itself).

Part of becoming educated is the realization that domestic violence and the traits of perpetrators is just one side of the picture. For every incident of domestic abuse, there are going to be trauma responses to the abuse. One does not go without the other.

One thing that we do know is that sexual abuse of minors is very, very high on the PTSD scale. For children under 12 who are sexually abused, roughly 93 percent of those children will develop PTSD, depending on whose statistic you look at, and whether inappropriate touching (i.e. "copping a feel") is part of that statistic (most of the time it is).

But all abuses create trauma, especially if they are perpetrated more than a few times, especially if the trauma goes untreated, whether the abuse contains sadism, whether there is an accumulation of different kinds of traumas, and so on. 

If you put a child through sexual abuse, and they receive other kinds of abuses, then the likelihood of PTSD rises to 100 percent. 

There was much more information research done about PTSD than about abusers when I started.

In order to heal from PTSD, being educated about the abusers' side is paramount. As so many therapists put it, "You have to stop the bleeding first" before you can heal. Also: "You have to give up on abusers." Yes. You have to give up on them changing (99.75 will not change - especially those with narcissistic or Antisocial Personality Disorder traits - and the rest of the quarter of one percent who do change and realize there is something wrong with how they relate to others often become extremely depressed, even suicidal, which is why the recidivism rate is so high for those who enter therapy - they abuse because it makes them "feel good" and keeps the uncomfortable depression and realizations away, even though it is at the expense of the other person, and even though it requires an extremely uncaring approach, at the very least, towards the other person).

You have to understand how they love: it is "utilitarian love" (loving you as though you are a "utility object", like a wind-up doll, where the mechanisms are either working or not working the way your abuser wants). Their love is also about love turning to hate in the blink of an eye, and love bombing, all of it temporary. The temporary bursts of love followed by hate and sometimes back again, degradation, dismissal and vindictiveness over time will create anxiety in their victims, then hyper-vigilance, then trauma, and then end with full blown PTSD.

It is not the kind of love the rest of us experience: enduring, expansive, enlightening, intimate, reciprocal, vulnerable, beautiful, calming (which opens the flood gates for trust), ending up with a life that is more powerful, peaceful and embracing than a trauma-ridden relationship with an abuser whose love is always suspect, shallow and due to change at any moment.

The first step is getting off of the wheel ... and why getting off the wheel is the best option for all trauma survivors to heal from the symptoms (and not to scare anyone, but the symptoms can become so horrific that sometimes people would rather die than go through one more day, or "even the possibility" of one more trauma).

I started this blog for survivors of abuse. I am not worried about perpetrators reading this blog because the high majority of them will avoid any kind of reading about this anyway (i.e. "stirring the pot" of their own self reflection) and will find the blog "uncomfortable", and will stop reading for that reason. Survivors are the people who will want to ask "why" and it is for them that I write. The high majority of perpetrators don't ask why and go on to their next fantasy or next narcissistic supply source.

THE EXPLOSION OF RESEARCH ON ABUSE

In the last couple of years, after I started this blog, there has been an emergence of easy-to-find information from a lot of sources, whereas before there weren't.

Psychology Today finally took up the subject of abuse and narcissism in greater numbers of articles (again, after I started this blog). So did Psych Central.

Lenora Thompson, a survivor, started writing her blog about growing up in a narcissistic family and her escape into a normal life (on Psych Central and The Huffington Post, the first of its kind for a major publication internet site, using her real name, and not a pseudonym, though before, most survivors set up their own blogs with pseudonyms).

Then the professional information on both Psychology Today and Psych Central seemed to explode with hundreds of articles, some of them redundant.

Then Med Circle started interviewing top mental health professionals on a variety of conditions, including narcissism and narcissistic abuse - it was an extremely popular You Tube channel.

Then psychologists like Ross Rosenberg, Judy Rosenberg, Les Carter and Ramani Durvasula and others decided to start their own You Tube channels (possibly after seeing so many life coaches like Lisa Romano, Shahida Arabi and Richard Grannon become wildly successful at taking on the subject of narcissistic abuse).

But before all of these people started, there was the You Tube channel by Sam Vaknin. He is a survivor of the most severe kinds of childhood abuse, and also diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Malignant Narcissism). His channel is about looking inside the narcissist's head and emotions to understand what narcissists think and feel, and why they act in the way they act (or I should say "react") - abusing others being a kind of automatic trigger-impulse-driven defense weapon against any chance of being abused or abandoned themselves; in other words they insist on being the perpetrator in the instigation of abuse and abandonment - even when the possibility of abuse or abandonment is not real, and is only a figment of their imagination.

And indeed, he does go into why a lot of what narcissists perceive in other people as a figment of their imagination (a fantasy driven by "being in a horror house of mirrors" is how he refers to it). He has a lot of self reflection, something not present in the high majority of narcissists, so one wonders if he just has PTSD with most of the narcissistic traits, but not all of them ... and by the way, his advice to his 103,000 subscribers is to abandon narcissists because they don't have good intentions towards others, that the only possibility of narcissists rehabilitating in any small way is losing most or all of their relationships, and even then they often back-track because he believes that abuse, power, control and know-it-all arrogant behaviors (which hide fear, ignorance, and a crushed ego) are an addiction for his fellow narcissists. I do think that a lot of You Tube psychologists have listened to what he has to say, but to be "professional", they tend to go with "research driven" material only (so that their professionalism is not questioned).

And by the way, if narcissists do end up on my page, I would suggest they go watch his videos instead, as I think they will get a lot more out of them than lingering in a place where victims dwell.

Anyway, I wondered what I could add to this influx of great information as all of these channels are so good at explaining what is going on. And it is a reason to drop my own writing on this subject ... except I have already written the articles in large part. All I have to do is edit, add the latest information, pop in the artwork, and I am ready to go ... except, I couldn't get to the art work, which is why I stopped doing it ... and I was spending so much of my "free time" researching and writing about PTSD instead (which is a way of saying I got to stage two without completing stage one).

The reason I was on fire is that I wanted to know "why" on all of it, sooner rather than later.

I hope to illustrate the articles at a later time.

THIRD STEP

I do have a third step in my sights after publishing enough posts on perpetrators (their tactics, vindictiveness, the "why" part of what they are doing) and their victims (trauma-related issues, the "why" part of PTSD - and even much more trivial subjects like "why" such a high majority of female survivors of childhood abuse have long hair, even extra-ordinarily long hair). 

And just to let you know, the "why" part of long hair started when I first began to go to survivor events. So many women with free flowing long locks down their backs, and hardly anyone with short hair. So many fantasy artists. So many nurses. So many Kindergarten, Second and Third Grade teachers. So many going to alternative medicine practitioners. So many estranged from their families. And not to be too redundant, but "why"? 

And so I looked for these answers while writing a post on something else totally unrelated, and in the case of "long hair" I was writing a post about "the isolation tactic" (i.e. why perpetrators want to control who you communicate with, and what you communicate, leading to isolation). If you are a long time reader you know that I haven't finished or published my post on the isolation tactic yet (but I will put a link here to it when I finish the editing).  

Part of finishing up the research part of this blog may be to spend more time putting up great videos of the psychologists. Instead of pounding the keyboard to such an extent and getting headaches from over-reading and extending into more esoteric matters on these subjects, I should just let all of the wonderful psychologists talk, yes?

So, for some posts, that is what you will see: less writing from me, more videos from the psychologists, more "further reading". 

All so I can get to step 3, which is really where I want to be now. But, I thought it was important to survivors who landed on my page to get all of the research they need. I am behind you and beside you. Finding healing resources is not easy unless you know the terms (which is why I use terms like "ostracism" instead of "scapegoat" in some subject lines: "ostracism" being a more common term that people might lookup on Google than "scapegoat").

I also wrote the articles because some people don't know they have been abused until they are in their late fifties when they are experiencing horrible symptoms and they can't find out "why". 

While I am going to keep step 3 under wraps for now, it will involve videos and a video channel (and inserted into this blog), more direct communication, more comic relief (comedy does help the suffering, yes?)

So bear with me as I try to wrap up the research part of it in the next year or so. It may not be perfect. It may rely very heavily on "studies" and videos sometimes, and may be dry. I don't mind if you go off my page and follow someone else who is pumping out the answers faster (videos can do that better than the written word, and they are exceptional at getting you information in succinct form). You can always come back to see Step 3 if you find my writing isn't getting to the gist of the matter quickly and succinctly enough. 

Or just come back to read a movie review or two or three.  

Here is to your healing!